Wetlands

Procedures

Get Waived

25 Builders Get Break

From County's Rules

Four months ago, Broward County passed new rules to discourage developers from paving marshes that purify South Florida's drinking water.

On Tuesday, the County Commission waived those rules for 25 developers, who will be spared tens of millions of dollars in costs of restoring wetlands when they bulldoze hundreds of acres of marshes.

"The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, and so does Broward County," said Janie Murders, president of the Country Estates Homeowners Association in southwest Broward, who protested the decision.

Developers said waiving the rules was only fair. Their projects had been in the approval pipeline for months or years before the new rules began.

"No one is trying to pull anything over on anybody," said Ed Stacker, a lawyer representing several of the developers.

Wetlands need protection because they store water when it rains, then filter it as it seeps into the Biscayne Aquifer, South Florida's huge, spongelike underground water supply.

The new rules were passed on Nov. 23 after a bruising fight between builders and environmentalists.

County rules say that when developers destroy wetlands to build subdivisions and other projects, they must either build new marshes or restore ailing ones that are infested with melaleuca trees or other invading vegetation.

The new rules make the restoration much more costly. Developers now must build or restore about 60 percent more than they had to under the old rules.

But when the new rules were passed in November, county officials forgot to decide what to do about 25 developers with pending requests to build on 4,700 acres of wetlands.

After an hour of arguing on Tuesday, the County Commission let those 25 build under the old rules.

"It's a question of fairness," County Commissioner John Rodstrom said. "These were the rules in effect when they came to us."

The first impact came within 90 minutes on Tuesday.

The County Commission approved 4,339 homes in the Pembroke Meadows project on Sheridan Street at Interstate 75, after developer Engle Homes Inc. agreed to slash melaleucas from 251 acres of marshes.

That was all of the mitigation required under the old rules. Under the new rules, the company would have had to restore approximately 655 acres of wetlands.

Restoring an acre of wetlands costs about $25,000, said Jim Goldasich, county director of biological resources. So Tuesday's move saved Engle Homes as much as $10 million.

Other big winners:

-- Arvida Inc., which wants to build on 1,200 acres of Weston wetlands along the east side of U.S. 27. The company once proposed 2,000 homes, but now won't say how many would be built.

The privately run Florida Wetlandsbank figures that for every 100 acres of wetlands destroyed, the new rules demand that 43 to 52 acres be restored. For every 100 acres a company escapes restoring, the savings would be $2.5 million.

County Commissioner Scott Cowan said only six projects totaling 357 acres came in within two months of the vote.